Audit service launched to judge pharma marketing success
pharmafile | February 8, 2005 | News story | |
Marketing consultants Q2 Audit have launched a service to measure pharma's marketing effectiveness and give an indication of future product success.
Among its clients, Q2 already counts Pfizer's New York-based global group, for what it terms its 'brand-centric' as opposed to financial, audit. The company says its new service is the first industry-standard measure for pharma to assess its product commercialisation from pre- to post-launch.
Chief operating officer Stephen de Looze said: "It is very difficult to know what 'good' looks like when it comes to product commercialisation. Q2 Audit will apply a vigorous and structured audit to a product, looking at what is and is not beneficial to its progress."
Q2 Audit says its service tool is already being used by investors, analysts, senior management and brand teams to rate companies' marketing plans with the latest benchmark planning, best practice and investment indices.
Founding directors de Looze, Dr Alexander Gray and Mike Rea launched Q2 Audit in October 2004. The company is based in the Centre of Innovation at Cranfield University in Bedfordshire and is part of the Idea Group, along with IdeaPharma, the marketing agency led by Rea.
de Looze, who worked in product management for Boots and 3M as well as on the agency side, says the service will allow pharma companies to see if new drugs are likely to match up to their potential in a fluctuating market place.
"Markets are subject to rapidly changing dynamics that impact directly on the revenue performance of individual brands. Therefore, reassurance is needed, at each milestone in the product's lifecycle, that the correct strategy is in place," he said.
Q2 say that by judging all products using the same scale they will be able to benchmark different brands' commercialisation strategies and allow companies to gauge the shifting impact of market factors.
The audit provides an independent assessment of the probability that a drug will underperform or outperform its market and a report detailing the factors leading to the rating.
Q2 assesses each product within its own market situation and rates the qualitative campaign against best practice and assesses the quantitative investment, to provide a single overall score of 0-4. The company says that by increasing the rating of a commercialisation programme in its audit by 0.5 could increase the peak year sales of a blockbuster drug by $1 billion.
It says the uses for its audit include improving resource utilisation, comparing the output of brand teams within an organisation, indicating an effective launch strategy to analysts without revealing strategy details to competitors, management reporting and creating a de facto archive of key stage decision-making.
